The rifle lay half under him, its stock protruding from beneath his body.  With the elbow of his left arm he was able to work it out.  Considering the difficulties under which he worked, he made amazingly few false motions; and yet he worked with swiftness.  Warwick was a man who had been schooled and trained by many dangers; he had learned to face them with open eyes and steady hands, to judge with unclouded thought the exact percentage of his chances.  He knew now that he must work swiftly.  The shape in the shadow was not going to wait all night.

But at that moment the hope of preserving his life that he had clung to until now broke like a bubble in the sunlight.  He could not lift the gun to swing and aim it at a shape in the darkness.  With his mutilated hands he could not cock the strong-springed hammer.  And if he could do both these things with his fumbling, bleeding, lacerated fingers, his right hand could not be made to pull the trigger.  Warwick Sahib knew at last just where he stood.  Yet if human sight could have penetrated that dusk, it would have beheld no change of expression in the lean face.

An English gentleman lay at the frontier of death.  But that occasioned neither fawning nor a loss of his rigid self-control.

Two things remained, however, that he might do.  One was to call and continue to call, as long as life lasted in his body.  He knew perfectly that more than once in the history of India a tiger had been kept at a distance, at least for a short period of time, by shouts alone.  In that interlude, perhaps help might come from the village.  The second thing was almost as impossible as raising and firing the rifle; but by the luck of the gods he might achieve it.  He wanted to find Singhai’s knife and hold it compressed in his palm.

It wasn’t that he had any vain hopes of repelling the tiger’s attack with a single knife-blade that would be practically impossible for his mutilated hand to hold.  Nahara had five or so knife-blades in every paw and a whole set of them in her mouth.  She could stand on four legs and fight, and Warwick could not lift himself on one elbow and yet wield the blade.  But there were other things to be done with blades, even held loosely in the palm, at a time like this.

He knew rather too much of the way of tigers.  They do not always kill swiftly.  It is the tiger way to tease, long moments, with half-bared talons; to let the prey crawl away a few feet for the rapture of leaping at it again; to fondle with an exquisite cruelty for moments that seem endless to its prey.  A knife, on the other hand, kills quickly.  Warwick much preferred the latter death.

And even as he called, again and again, he began to feel about in the grass with his lacerated hand for the hilt of the knife.  Nahara was steadily stealing toward him through the shadows.

The great tigress was at the height of her hunting madness.  The earlier adventure of the evening when she had missed her stroke, the stir and tumult of the beaters in the wood, her many days of hunger, had all combined to intensify her passion.  And finally there had come the knowledge, in subtle ways, that two of her own kind of game were lying wounded and helpless beside the ford.